Much is made by the anti-women zealots of an old "documentary" called Silent Scream, which is credited with arrousing the passions of this oppressive political movement. (For a thorough debunking of this work of exaggerated agitprop, go here). As we watch an extremist movement conservative slouch his way onto the Supreme Court this week, helped along by radicals in the Republican Party, a lapdog media and a disinterested "opposition" party, we must sadly note that the "screams" of undeveloped masses of human tissue matter more than the actual screams of an a majority of Americans.

We scream at our televisions as CNN's news-poodles regurgitate GOP talking points, apparently fed directly into their teleprompters from RNC fax machines. We scream through faxes, letters, emails and phone calls to our "representatives" in Washington, but apparently those faxes arrive blank, or garbled into incomprehensible hieroglyphs when they pop out on a staffers desk. The emails must arrive rearranged into UNICODE symbols, the letters wet with ink and graphite running together and our phone calls must sound as though we're calling on cheap cell phones as we drive into tunnels, because it's quite plain that our alarm, our absolute disgust and FEAR of what this country is becoming, HAS BECOME, is manifestly not having an impact.

So we can look forward to an America where more young woman scream into their pillows, fearful of an abusive parent finding out about an unwanted pregnancy she can no longer get help ending. More and more women will cry in their bathrooms, quietly so as not to upset their children, as they look down at a positive pregnancy test knowing that they can't afford another mouth to feed, horrified that there is no way out. More husbands will cry by their wife's bedside as high-risk pregnancies go bad, left to watch helplessly as she suffers, no trained doctors available to save her with a now-illegal lifesaving procedure. Hell, that America already exists in far too many states, but it can and will get worse under this new court, as this lying, Bork-worshipping conservative activist joins his buddies Scalia, Roberts and Thomas on the bench.

What else can we look forward to? More people screaming as their mouths fill with flood waters, as their lungs fill with noxious gases and their children's cries are silenced by asthmatic hacking, as more and more enviromental laws, workplace safety laws and public health systems are gutted by a rapacious corporate culture and their Republican shocktroops. These citizens will find less and less recourse from the courts as the Supreme Court will be packed now with corporate friendly ladder climbing ambitious assholes who've made it painfully clear they were willing to say anything, join any hate group to advance either their careers or their own bigotries. It's hard to tell which, since they are utterly unable as a group to speak honestly and forthrightly about what they do believe. Monsters cloaking themselves in Hallmark platitudes.

In today's America, the only tears that matter are of the crocodile variety, leaking down the privileged cheeks on cue of the wealthy woman standing by her man, political theater for the Oprah nation. No, the tears in flooded neighborhoods, in Appalachian mines, in low-rent bedrooms and bathrooms and over-crowded public hospitals don't matter a whit, nor do the screams crying out for justice and representation and an actual fight for civil rights and a better tomorrow.